THIS was quite a bill: John Grieve, Molly Weir, Alec Finlay, Renee Houston and Jimmy Logan, all on stage at Glasgow’s Metropole Theatre. The photocall took place on March 11, 1965, prior to the following week’s all-Scottish production of TW Watson’s play. Molly’s 2004 obituary noted that she had appeared in an earlier production, at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh, in 1956. “The lovelorn lad of the village,” the obituary explained, “goes courting a nippy-tongued housekeeper with Weir playing ‘the nippy tongued’ lass with joyous fervour.”

The play has often been revived by AmDram societies over the years. According to the Scottish Plays website, the play “is specially written to give scope for both English and Doric speaking characters … The plot deals with the trials and troubles of a young musician who finds the course of true love anything but smooth. But he is not the only person to discover this. The local undertaker and a nippy-tongued Scots housekeeper are also victims of Cupid’s darts. The balance is struck between romance and uproarious comedy”.

The play merits a brief mention in Logan’s 1998 memoirs, It’s A Funny Life. Writing about Captain Jack, a Bob Hoskins film, in which Logan went to Skye to film a cameo as a policeman, he says that the cast also included one Molly Weir, “who starred in Beneath the Wee Red Lums at the Metropole in 1965”.